17 September 2007

Cheapo productions surfing

I was shuffling reference books about, generally moving the less frequently-used ones to the shelves in the basement, and I picked up Shishir Gundavaram's CGI Programming on the World Wide Web (O'Reilly, 1996). Definitely one to move to the archive shelves. And yet—there is a sticky note on page 373, and it's there to mark a passage that describes a low-tech way to check on a web server using telnet:

You can use this technique to see the unvarnished HTML payload without doing a View>Page Source, as well as the HTTP headers. Best way to find out who's running Apache, who's running IIS, who's running something custom.

It's easy to run telnet from a Mac OS Terminal window: just remember to hit the enter key twice after you type type the GET line. I was less successful running telnet from a Windows Command Prompt window.

About Me

David Gorsline, full-time professional software developer since 1981, currently a part of the Digital Media team at NPR. Resident of Reston (Fairfax County), Virginia, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or any other organization.